Happy Policeman (18 page)

Chapter Forty

DeWitt was gazing out the window when Seresen returned and led him to the human side of the center. Curtis walked into the courtroom and gaveled for quiet. The trial started again.

Hattie entered the burned purse and clothes into evidence, then called Doc to the stand to testify that the indentations in the boys’ skulls matched the shape of the rock found in the grave.

When Hattie held up poster-sized photographs, the ones that Purdy had taken, a hush fell over the room.

“Objection,” Bo said. “Inflammatory.”

But the photos weren’t inflammatory at all. They were, despite the subject matter, beautiful. The three black-and-white stills of the boys had been taken during the exhumation. The photographer’s eye had caught the spill of light on a maimed hand, the drift of leaf mold on bare ribs. The lack of color made the scene timeless, as if it had filtered through a membrane between universes. The photos had less to do with death than with composition, perspective, and light. There was no color to expose the tawdriness of rain-battered, loamy clothes, the gaudiness of bloated blue flesh. There was no stench, no orange accusation of that raincoat.

The jury sat on the edges of their seats. Only Hubert Foster’s eyes wandered. Expression sad, he studied his hands.

Are they clean?
DeWitt wondered. When Foster looked down, did he see DeWitt’s misery on his fingers?

Bo objected; Curtis overruled. With a sigh, a small shake of his head, Foster returned his attention to the trial.

Hattie propped the stills on the desk. “Prosecution rests.”

Everyone, the jury, the spectators, the Torku, was staring at Billy. Everyone but his counsel. Bo was tidying up his papers, putting the collection of cartoon heads into his briefcase.

Curtis, too, had been watching Billy. Now he jerked himself out of his reverie and tapped the hammer against the table once. “It’s four-thirty. Let’s adjourn and convene tomorrow at nine sharp.”

Bo turned to DeWitt, opened his mouth as if to speak, but then his eyes drifted left. Instantly, Bo became occupied with his briefcase.

“Wittie?” Janet said at DeWitt’s shoulder.

As he turned, Denny grasped his fingers. “Hi, Daddy. We came to visit you, but you were asleep. Did you see my dead soldier?”

“What?”

“The dead soldier I made for you in Sunday School, Daddy. I’m gonna make a lot more. Soldiers with guns like I see in the movies. And tanks and things. We can play war.”

They had played war. Now Janet and Foster lay wounded; DeWitt shot through the heart. He looked for Hattie and saw her by the table. She was putting her notes away, her eyes downcast.

“Daddy. “ A tug on his hand. DeWitt’s gaze returned to his son, where he knew it belonged. “We’re going home now, okay?”

And DeWitt said, “Okay.”

Outside the center, blue-gray clouds advanced across the horizon. The icy breeze of a norther hit DeWitt’s back. He was tired; his incision ached. He followed Janet as if all decisions had been taken from his hands.

The Suburban was a steel-walled, sheltered prison. On the way home, the children chattered. He didn’t speak. At the house, Janet heated a twelve-count package of tamales in the microwave.

When they were all seated at the table, she passed the serving dish. He picked up a tamale, then put it down.

“Aren’t you hungry?” she asked.

He couldn’t look at her. His reply was sour. “Doc told me no spicy foods.”

The two girls exchanged worried glances. Janet prodded a chicken tamale with her fork as though it were a creature she wanted to awaken.

Denny was bouncing in his chair. “Daddy’s a hero,” he announced to the silence around the table.

“I know,” Janet said.

DeWitt left his lunch uneaten and went to take a shower. While he was shampooing his hair, Janet entered the bathroom and stood in the gap of the curtain. She had put on her robe. Her cornsilk hair was down.

“I missed you,” she said. “In the hospital when you wouldn’t see me, I wondered whether freedom was worth that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But he did. What he had thought a happy marriage she had seen as an armistice between her as the occupied territory and him as the invading force. He put his head under the shower and picked up the soap. Water beat him with tiny, angry fists.

Without warning Janet slipped the bathrobe from her shoulders and stepped naked into the shower. He saw the splay of her toes on the porcelain, then looked up at her bare breasts.

Time compressed—past the affairs, past the marriage. He remembered sweaty college fumblings in his old Pontiac, and how her breasts had dropped into his hands like ripe fruit from the discipline of her bra.

Gently she took the soap away. “Here. Let me do that.”

DeWitt leaned his forehead against the cool tile. Her hand slipped down his back. “It’s over. I told him I never wanted to see him again.”

She left room for his reply; he didn’t use it. She kissed his shoulder, pressed her face against his back. His penis stirred to life.

“Why Hattie? I thought you wanted someone who would agree with you. All those years I thought . . .” In the rush of water he felt the quieter, slower wet of her tears.

Because Hattie was simple. She wanted a policeman,
DeWitt thought.
And you wanted more.

Janet slid her hand between his legs and fondled him. “Tell me I’m better. Please tell me I’m better than she is.”

“Harder,” he told her instead.

Soon he turned, pressed her against the wall of the shower, and they made slippery, dangerous love. Just before he came, he was more excited than he had ever been with Hattie, nearly as excited as those frustrating evenings in the Pontiac.

When he came, the urgency left softly, sadly. The wound in his belly began to ache. She stepped away, leaving him braced in the corner, water rolling down his chest.

She toweled and put her bathrobe back on. “Why did you let Hattie be herself? Why did you want me to change?”

“God, Janet. Come on. Not once—not once in the time I’ve known you did I ask you to change.”

“But you
do,”
she said, as if DeWitt were a dimwitted god she longed to please. “You do it all the time. You organize my life as if I hired on as your maid.” She made her “funny face,” a private after-the-party grimace used to ridicule people they didn’t like. ““If you’d get the housework
organized,
dear, you could get finished faster.’
I
could get it all done in the morning, and have the rest of the afternoon off.”

“I just wanted to be helpful.”

“Did you ever wash a dish? Did you? Did you ever change a diaper? What makes you the damned resident expert on housework? On raising kids? For twenty years I kept my mouth shut. Maybe I was right: maybe keeping the peace
was
better than speaking my mind.”

Keeping the peace was his job. “You talk about me like I was some sort of monster. Did I ever hit you? Did I ever yell at you? Janet, did I ever once raise my voice?”

“Only because I never raised mine.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Right. Whenever I want to talk about anything important, your face shuts like a door.”

“I’m sorry.” But if what she said wasn’t true, he had no need to apologize. And if it was, no apology would be enough.

The water turned cold. and he shivered. A small, irritating pain in his midsection—the drawing ache of something that would never quite be healed.

“Oh, Wittie,” she sighed. “Twenty years of you playing deaf. And now I have to wonder. Do you want someone who will stand up to you? Is that what you want? I could be loud and overbearing like Hattie. I could—”

“Don’t drag Hattie into this. She was the only thing . . . “ His throat swelled with unshed tears. He remembered Hattie standing in the courtroom, dressed in her wrinkled blue suit. Even now, with the ruin of his marriage around him, loyal Hattie meant less than his unfaithful wife. “Hattie loves me.”

“I love you, too.”

Chilled, he bent to turn the shower off.

“Do you hear me, DeWitt? I love you. But I won’t be your damned ‘little woman’ anymore.”

She left the bathroom. He watched her go, wondering how he could set right the twenty years of harm she imagined he had done her.

Chapter Forty-One

When court convened the next morning, Bo stood, clasped his hands behind his back, and in a loud, self-assured voice called William James Harper to the stand.

“Tell us about the murder, Billy,” Bo said in a patient, tolerant way, as if to remind the jury to be forgiving, too.

“She was making the kids sick again,” Billy said.

A murmur went through the courtroom.

Bo raised his hand before Curtis could reach for the hammer. “Making the kids sick? How did Loretta make the kids sick?”

“Kept food out till it spoiled. Then she’d feed it to ‘em. Sometimes she just got tired of fooling with the boys, and that was the way she’d calm ‘em down. They’d be in bed a couple of days with the fever and all. Have her some rest, she’d say.” Billy looked around the courtroom, blinking slow. “But that time she got ‘em too sick. Had to call Doc out.”

DeWitt saw Doc in the third row from the door. His face was stricken.

“So what happened then?”

Billy scratched his knee. “Sunday evening she brings the boys over. She was out of gas and wanted me to give her some. Loretta was always thoughtless that way. Never planned for nothing. Always wanted a free ride. Anyway, that Sunday, them boys was feeling better, and they was messing up her kitchen. Gotta get out from under, she says. Wanted me to take care of ‘em.” Incredibly, his lips parted and he laughed, exposing the pink of his gums. “Wanted gas to get home and wanted me to take care of her kids.”

“You didn’t feel you could care for the boys?”

“Construction site’s no place for babysitting. Boys get under foot all the time. So,” he said, leaning back in the chair and hooking his thumbs in his belt, “she come around the side of the house. I was cleaning up my spray painter—”

“Exhibit E?”

“Right. Had just sprayed with latex, and needed to get the paint out. So all the time she’s yelling over the noise of that spray painter, and she just got louder and louder until I reached out to hit her and shut her up, only my hand’s holding that nozzle . . . “ His voice trailed off, and he shrugged. A small grin tugged at his mouth, as if he was still amused by the joke that fate had played on Loretta.

“You knew the spray painter was dangerous.”

“That’s a commercial rig. Spray comes out at seventy-five hundred p.s.i. Blow a hole right through your hand.”

“Were you aware of what you were doing when you struck her?”

“Naw.” He shrugged again, just one shoulder. “Wanted to clip her a little so’s she’d shut up.”

“So the first blow was an accident.”

“Yes, sir. It was accidental.”

“Then what?” Bo asked.

Billy took a deep breath, leaning back farther, as if he were sitting back from the dinner table after a good meal. “She fell down. She was still moving around a little and trying to scream. So I hit her again. There was a lot of blood that time.”

“How did you feel?”

“Hell, feel? I felt like I couldn’t think straight. I was mad at her for what she’d made me do. Loretta was always like that, pushing me and pushing until I lost control.”

“And then?”

“I come around the house to where them boys was and I seen ‘em playing Superman. Jason had that raincoat Loretta bought him, and they was running around the yard chunking concrete at a bandsaw I set up. I took that rock out of the boy’s hands, asked him what he thought he was doing.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing, but his face was sassy, you know? Loretta never taught them boys to mind. She was a who-re,” he said, making two bouncing syllables out of the word. Billy stopped and looked speculatively around the courtroom, as if judging how the aliens had set their joints and laid their baseboards.

“So you . . .”

“I hit him.”

“With the chunk of concrete.”

“Yes, sir.”

“What happened then?”

“He dropped. That other boy, he just took to his heels.” Billy shot straight up in his seat. His eyes narrowed as though even now he could see the child fleeing. “I yelled, ‘Commere!’” The command cracked like thunder through the courtroom, leaving an awed hush in its wake. Billy’s face was taut: the veins in his neck bulged. “ ‘Goddamn it! Commere!’ But he just kept going, and I went after him because nobody, nobody runs away from me like that!” Gradually Billy sat back, his face relaxing, the boy in his mind fading.

“And did you catch him?”

“Goddamned right I did. Taught him something about running away from his daddy.”

“With the chunk of concrete?”

“Right. The one that run was Billy Junior.”

DeWitt closed his eyes. When he opened them, he saw Billy picking at a hangnail.

“Tell me about your relationship with your wife,” Bo said as he turned to face the stunned jury.

“What about it?”

“You said she was a whore. Why?”

“When we was living together, she was always on the phone. Said she was talking to them church biddies. Said it was them Mary Kay customers, but I knew better. Laughing and joking with ‘em and then shutting up when I came by.”

“An affair. Then she threw you out. But no one, no one runs away from you like that. Did you often go by Loretta’s house? To see if her lover was there?”

“Damned right. Didn’t want her hiding from me. Thought she could do whatever the hell she had a mind to. Well, that ain’t the way a marriage works.”

“But you never saw anyone.”

Billy looked bewildered. “No.”

“Another man. How did vou feel about that?”

“How do you think? Made me goddamned crazy.”

“Crazy.” Bo let the word sink into the courtroom. The jury studied Billy as if he were a stranger. As if he might just be insane.

“And is that why you left Loretta’s body the way you did, and buried the boys?”

“Right. Wanted the man she was playing around with to see her up real good.”

DeWitt noticed Hattie’s frown. There was paper in front of her, but she had stopped taking notes.

“So you sat around your house and thought about your wife in the arms of her lover. You’d drive over, stand in her yard, and yell things. You were lonely. You were obsessed. Obsessed enough to make—”

“Objection! This isn’t a dime-store romance novel, Your Honor.”

“Sustained.”

Bo sighed. “How about other women? Did you get along with them?”

A sharp, mirthless laugh from Billy. “You know how women is. Always wanting more. Always hot for it. A man can get satisfied, but them women,” he said, shaking his head. “Nothing you ever do’s enough. They’s all who-res. Know what I mean?”

The courtroom was quiet. Bo stood, notes apparently forgotten. “All of them,” he said. “Every woman you’ve known. All of them whores. Tell me, Billy, did you ever hear the term
premature ejaculation?”

Billy’s eyebrows twitched.

“You’re afraid of women, aren’t you? All your life they seem to be running away. They have control over you. Over your desires. You want to stop them. You want to—”

“No!” Billy half-rose from his seat.

“Did you ever seek help for a sexual problem?”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with me! It’s them. It’s all of them.”

Bo’s head sank. Billy, still rattled, eased back into his chair. “No further questions at this time, Your Honor. Defense reserves the right to recall.”

“Your witness,” Curtis said to Hattie.

She stood, her face full of fury. “When you killed the boys, you were so mad you couldn’t think straight?”

“Right, and—”

“But you could think straight enough to hide the car where the Torku would find it. You could think straight enough to bury the boys. But the boys were small, and a foot under the loam is all white rock. So you just left Loretta where you thought nobody would find her, hoping the coyotes would finish the job. That’s why you burned the clothes and left the body out to rot. You were just too goddamned lazy to dig her a grave, weren’t you?”

“Objection!”

“Overruled.”

Bo pounded the table. “Damn it, Curtis! She’s not even giving him time to answer! You can’t allow—”

Curtis screamed, “Sit down!” Then to Hattie: “Get on with it, prosecutor, make your point!”

And Hattie did. “That stuff about wanting her so-called boyfriend to find her is a lie, isn’t it? She never had a boyfriend, did she? You killed her because you don’t like anyone to run away from you, isn’t that right?”

“Objection,” Bo said wearily. The wind had shifted. DeWitt could feel it. Bo had to know it, too. Indignation gathered in the room; hung silent, ominous, like an approaching storm.

Hattie turned away. “No further questions.”

Bo stood. “Defense calls Marvin Howell Murphy.”

“No,” Hattie said, momentarily forgetting her role.

“Overruled,” Curtis told her, not forgetting his.

Hattie’s son slouched to the stand.

“Has your mother ever hit you?” Bo asked as soon as the boy was sworn in.

Marv paled. He glanced to Hattie.

“Did she ever whip you?’

The boy flinched. “Yes, sir. But only when—”

“She ever threaten to kill you?”

“She . . .”

Bo shoved his face into the boy’s and shouted, “Answer the question!”

Miserable, Marv looked at his mother. Hattie was covering the bottom of her face with her hand as though to still her son’s mouth.

Curtis leaned across the table and said gently, “It’s all right, son. It’ll be all right. Just answer the question.”

A lone tear worked its way from the boy’s eye and slid down his cheek. “She’d say stuff like she was going to duck my head in the toilet and flush it.” His eyes searched the crowd. “And she’d say she was going to pull my arm out of its socket and beat me over the head with it, stuff like that.” His wandering gaze snagged on Bo’s frown.

“No more questions.”

“Cross?” Curtis asked.

Hattie was already on her feet. “I ever beat your head in with a rock and kill you?”

“No, ma’am.”

“No more questions.” Hattie turned her back on her son and let him walk to the prosecution’s table alone.

“DeWitt Earl Dawson,” Bo said.

DeWitt was so surprised by the call that he didn’t move until the man next to him elbowed him in the side. He got to his feet and went to the witness stand.

There were sharp edges to the morning light. From the eastern windows, sun struck Bo’s watch a glancing blow. He turned, and the light fell full on his face. Bo’s cheeks glowed like a candle in the dim room.

He gave DeWitt an apologetic look. “I called you up here as an expert witness in temporary insanity.”

“I don’t think—”

“Temporary insanity.”

DeWitt watched Bo pace.

“You’re an officer of the law, correct?”

DeWitt cleared his throat. “Yes.”

“And you take your job seriously.”

“That’s right.”

Bo’s charcoal-gray form eclipsed Seresen’s moon-round, pink eyes.

“Would you say you’re a controlled man?”

Crossing his legs, DeWitt said, “Yes. I’d say I was controlled. It’s part of my job.”

“You’re forced to take abuse?”

“Sometimes.” DeWitt glanced around the room, picking out the traffic offenders: the drinkers, the speeders, the runners of red lights. Often, when he stopped them, they forgot to be polite. DeWitt could not afford to.

“Have you ever, during an arrest, let’s say, hit an unarmed person in the performance of your duty?”

“Never.” It was warm in the room. DeWitt pulled at his collar.

“Never. And you’ve never hit a suspect when he or she was subdued?”

“No.” DeWitt shot an angry glance at the officer. “We’ve worked together for over nine years. We’ve talked a lot about excessive force, remember? You know I believe it’s legally and morally wrong.”

It was Bo who went to the dangerous edge of control. For DeWitt it was always yes sir and no sir to people who were too drunk to get out of the front seat.
May I see your driver’s license, sir?

“Legally and morally.” Bo’s head was down, and it seemed he was pondering DeWitt’s answer. Then he lifted his gaze. “Edward Theodore Wilkins.”

DeWitt blinked, trying to place the name.

Then, like a stray shaft of wheat in a mown field, a lanky teenaged boy rose from the seated crowd.

Eddie.

“You remember this boy, Chief Dawson?”

“Yes.”

“What?” Bo inclined his head, cupped his ear. “Please speak up, or I’ll have to get the boy himself up on the stand.”

Where the light hit the side of Bo’s cheek, the skin was smooth and almost translucent. Just under the jaw was a spot the razor had missed.

“No, I remember.”

“Did you ever hit this boy?”

“Yes.”

“Speak up, please.”

“Yes!”

“Was the boy unarmed?”

DeWitt looked down at his own lap. “Yes.”

“Was he fighting you?”

“No.”

“And didn’t you, without the boy’s provocation, hit him hard enough in the stomach to knock him down?”

DeWitt nodded.

“Wasn’t the blow strong enough that it could have easily caused his death?”

“Objection!” Hattie’s voice. “Speculation!”

“Sustained.”

A whisper of feet on carpet. Bo was pacing again. “Did you ever hit anyone else?”

DeWitt started to shake his head, but stopped.

“Your daughter?” Bo asked. His face was pinched, his blue eyes anguished. “Please. Answer the question.”

DeWitt’s throat constricted. He glanced at Janet and wished he hadn’t. “Yes.”

“Did you hurt her?”

“Yes.”

“And if you had had a rock in your hand at that moment, it’s possible you might have killed her.’

“Objection!” Hattie shouted. “Calls for—”

“Sustained.”

“Your Honor, who are we trying here, anyway?” There were twin spots of color on Hattie’s cheeks, and her curly brown hair had escaped its bun. Her indignation made her look frightening and clownish, all at the same time.

“I told you, sustained. You won your point, prosecutor.” Bo walked to the defense table. DeWitt, thinking his testimony was finished, began to rise. Bo froze him with a stare.

“On or about December third of this year, did you enter the defendant’s house, and did you do so without a search warrant?”